Strange World
by One Wish Magic
Summary: A missing scene from The Winter Soilder. Natasha learns that it's okay to lose control in a slightly unorthodox way.


_I honestly don't know why I wrote this. It was never intended to be uploaded. It was never even intended to be finished. It's not a work that I am in any way proud of, yet at the same time it has a subtle charm to it which made me think that maybe someone would enjoy it? I don't know. _

_I own nothing. I make no profit from this work._

* * *

Steve depressed the accelerator as they turned onto Route 101, sparing the rear-view mirror a cursory glance to ensure they were not being followed. They had been on the run for a little over twenty-seven hours now and while, theoretically, they were forcing S.H.E.I.L.D to widen its net instead of tightening it, any new road potentially presented an ambush, and any wrong turn was invariably a death sentence. But he was trying not to think about that. There had been enough close calls already.

The road was clear behind and ahead of them and he allowed himself to relax. Marginally.

Beside him Natasha watched the world pass by at eighty-five miles per hour, a look of complete serenity on her face which Steve had never seen before. He watched her shyly out of the corner of his eye, entranced by the way one single expression had the power to alter the whole ensemble of her features. He wondered, distantly, if maybe there wasn't something in the complete, unrestrained freedom of the fugitive lifestyle which appealed her on a purely instinctual level. After all he had not known her long, but even that was long enough to know that Natasha Romanoff was not engineered to follow any will but her own.

Feeling a little hot, he pried the collar of his t-shirt away from his skin and rolled down the automatic window. He didn't want to admit that being in such close quarters with her made him nervous, but it did. He respected her as a partner, valued her as a team-member, even liked her as a person, but she put up too many walls – that he was continually running into – for him to really get to know her. Her unshakable stoicism made her seem … cold, impenetrable. It had a way of making even him feel small; re-awakening all the old insecurities of the inconsequential kid from Brooklyn.

He wondered if, sometimes, she even did it on purpose: liked to make the people around her feel impotent. But when it really came down to it, her thought her aloofness seemed closer to a defence mechanism than any form of attack. Sometimes you see and experience things that, afterwards, make people hard to trust. Steve understood.

So when he heard her suck in a small breath and sigh, he initially thought nothing of it, his full attention returned to scanning the road. But when she did it again, and then a third time with only a few seconds interim, he frowned and turned to look at her. She was slouched almost supine in the chair, her striped hood still pulled up across her hair and her feet, once again, crossed on the dash. For all intents and purposes she appeared calm but for the strangely vulnerable, strangely exposed expression that lit her eyes, and spoke of an animal panic.

Concerned, Steve began to ask what was wrong, but then he saw it. The quick punch of her stomach, evident even beneath her clothes, the accompanying upper-body jerk. He bit back his laughter and returned his eyes discreetly to the road while she figured out how to play this.

Hiccups were a loss of control. Something a person like Natasha had to find completely mortifying. And currently she was trapped in a close, claustrophobic environment with no where to run. Right then Steve almost felt guilty for his own existence, which had culminated in this moment.

He could tell she was trying to be discreet, a condition the human body regularly condemns. She would wait for each coming spasm and then at the last minute swallow, effectively smothering the sound. With small movements to compensate, she would hide the accompanying jerks. Steve both marvelled and despaired at this concealment, and wondered how she had come to equate such an inconsequential bodily disruption with something as significant as a loss of respect. Something to be avoided at all costs.

He adhered to her wish for privacy, however, and for the next ten minutes they drove on in silence. But our bodies ultimately always have a way of betraying us. One spasm came too hot on the heels of a previous for her to swallow it down and the forceful, airy sound rang out loudly in the confines of the car. She immediately slapped both hands over her mouth, her cheeks lighting up the same colour as her hair.

Calmly Steve reached across her to the glove compartment, extracting a plastic bottle and placing it in her lap.

"Water helps," he says with a small smile.

Natasha nods, not meeting his eyes. She takes a deep breath, un-caps the bottle and drinks the contents down in one continuous stream until she's forced to stop and breath. Then she waits, her feet dancing up and down in anticipation. But it hasn't worked.

"Dammit." She says it like she's berating herself.

Steve can tell she's attempting a crisis recovery, so he says in an offhand tone, hoping his own dismissal will put her at ease:

"Don't worry, happens to me all the time."

She doesn't say anything, and she refuses to look at him. Instead she stares out the window, as if the view of scrub-brush along the highway is about the most interesting thing she has seen all year. But Steve knows she is really focusing on her own body; trying to assert control over the one muscle that she was in the wrong profession to hone. He can sense she's becoming desperate. The women who can keep her cool in a level seven crisis situation is falling apart over this. Strange world.

"Natasha?"

"Hmmm."

When he doesn't answer she is forced to look at him, with mild irritation and impatience. Which is exactly what he wants. His blue eyes meet her green ones and challenge them for sincerity.

"It's okay to lose control."

She frowns at him and hiccups. But she doesn't attempt to suppress it any more. He takes this both as an indication of trust, and a tacit threat to never speak of this moment again. Everything with her is equivocals and opposites, after all.

Nevertheless she seems to relax, become fractionally less self-conscious. She rests a hand lightly on her chest, grimacing every now and again at a particularly harsh spasm. Her fingers tease the small silver arrow she wears around her neck.

"You know -" she hiccups silently, "for the longest time it's just been me and Clint *hmpf.* It's strange suddenly to have to rel-rely on other people."

Steve nods thoughtfully.

"I can understand that."

"Sometimes it *hic* feels like a betrayal."

They take a sharp right turn and follow a new road. Steve systematically scans their surrounding for any sign of impeding attack. At the forefront of his mind is the knowledge that, even with the best of their skills, they can't outrun S.H.E.I.L.D forever. That it's like trying outrun inevitability itself.

Ten minutes later Natasha still has the hiccups and, even accepting her loss of control, she's becoming irritated with their persistence. Steve chuckles at the distinctly child-like pout on the face of one of world's most dangerous assassins. Something he would not have dared to do even two months previous.

"Try not to think about it," he tells her. "If you take your mind off them they'll go."

Natasha pins him with a sceptical look. Steve shrugs:

"Always works for me. Here."

He leans across and switches on the radio, turning the dial until a station comes through the static. It's playing a song from his own childhood, and he smiles in fond remembrance as the words cross the boundary between then and now. Natasha, however, does not share his taste in music.

"No," she states categorically.

He relinquishes the dial to her slim fingers, allowing her to cruise through the stations until she lands on one she likes. At some indeterminable point the distraction works and her hiccups stop.

She sits back in her seat with wide-eyed disbelief.

"Told you."

The next time Steve is overwhelmed by the ghosts of his past, it's Natasha who's there to remind him that it's okay to lose control.

* * *

_Thank you for reading _

_- One Wish Magic._


End file.
